Friday, April 14, 2017

For God So Loved Her, Part 5

Adapted from a sermon I preached in Ona a few weeks ago....

There is a Thursday evening worship service at my church called Common Grounds. It is a worship service with a free meal; each week over 100 homeless or marginally homeless people come to eat and to be fed – in all ways. One year, the pastor decided to combine Common Grounds with our church’s Maundy Thursday service – the communion service that remembers Jesus last supper before the crucifixion. That night at church there was a common meal, with members of the church and the homeless who attend common grounds. One woman stood to the side and asked someone else, “What do we do? Are we supposed to sit with them?”

God so loved both the homeless and the not-homeless...

What barriers do you imagine there are between you and those who need the grace of God? Will you break through them? Can we imagine ourselves as Jesus, breaking the rules to speak with an outsider? Will you tell everyone what a difference God has made in your life? Can you convince them? Will you?

This is what the woman at the well did. God reached out to her – as God reaches out to us – the outsiders. Her life was so changed, that she had to tell the story.

The story from John says, “Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman's testimony,”

Will you share the good news? Will you tell people that God so loves you, that he broke down all barriers to change your life? Will you act like Jesus did, and break through whatever barriers exist to tell other the same good news?

In the words of Randle Mixon, "What does it mean to be so fully rooted and grounded in God, so centered in our own experience of the Christian story, that we cannot keep from sharing it? In the words of the old hymn, when we feel our faith in our very bones, "how can we keep from singing?"

Go from this place and let your words, your very life, be your song, so that everyone can come to know the Good News of Christ.

Because there are no barriers. The is only God, who so loved the world.